Venopi is an online platform that connects event organisers with a curated selection of unique venues and trusted event suppliers. It simplifies the event planning process by providing a centralised platform where users can discover, compare, and book venues and services for various events.

Venopi offers a wide range of venues, including unique and unconventional spaces, and allows users to connect with suppliers providing services such as catering, entertainment, decorations, and more. The platform aims to streamline the event planning experience, save time and effort, and offer a convenient solution for organising successful and memorable events.

Venopi was born end of 2017 as a personal problem-solver tool and fun-side-project. It was shipped within one weekend to solve one burning IRL question: "I desperately need an affordable space next week to shoot an indie film. How do I do this?"

It turned out it was a lot of manual work 😭 It was a painful and time-consuming experience. As a software engineer who loves simplicity and automation, our founder started to think of a better way to do all of this.

After learning and iterating from our users and experiences, at the beginning of 2020, Venopi evolved into a platform for various event suppliers to do smart work — the pandemic was also one of the reasons we double-down on the expansion. We want to help other event suppliers collaborate and digitalise their services so they can get customers using monetisation methods such as offering their service for the virtual event, teaching a masterclass, collaborating with various suppliers to host an event with a ticketing system, and others.

One of our audacious goals is to be the only framework any event services and organisers ever need and want. From A to Z — whenever people think of "event", we want them to think of "Venopi".

In the last year 26,316+ Users has been using Venopi. Since its launch in 2017, Venopi has received 178,548+ visits. This number keeps growing,

Venopi makes money from membership and commission fee. Check out Venopi pricing page.

Venopi has a big hairy audacious goal to delight our customers around the globe and to delight our customers in the long-term, we have to survive in the short term. Bankrupt companies don't delight their customers.

Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again.

Whether or not this is done in good faith, in practice this kind of 'exit event' is a pump-and-dump scheme. The very popularity that attracts a buyer also makes the project financially unsustainable. The owners cash out, the acquirer gets some good engineers, and the users get screwed.

To avoid this problem, avoid mom-and-pop projects that don't take your money! You might call this the anti-free-software movement.

If every additional user is putting money in the developers' pockets, then you're less likely to see the site disappear overnight. If every new user is costing the developers money, and the site is really taking off, then get ready to read about those synergies.

To illustrate, I have prepared this handy chart:

	Free	Paid
Stagnant	losing money	making money
Growing	losing more money	making more money
Exploding	losing lots of money	making lots of money

What if a little site you love doesn't have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn't take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.

I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.

So stop getting caught off guard when your favorite project sells out! “They were getting so popular, why did they have to shut it down?” Because it's hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt. And because it's culturally acceptable to leave your user base high and dry if you get a good offer, citing self-inflicted financial hardship.

Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won't do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you'll be the only game in town!

So if you want Venopi to survive, please support it and become a paid member.

Venopi is NOT a venture capital funded startup. We are bootstrapped. That means we don't have any external funding on purpose so that we can focus on really giving value to our community. We believe that when we create a product that is loved by our community, it will all be OK.

We really meant it when we say, your success is our success. The only way for us to succeed is to make you successful.

We are not saying that all venture-capital funded startups are bad and that VCs are nasty. It is one of our wishes to work with great VCs that care about sustainability, future of work, people, and do-good. For now, we choose to focus our limited time and energy to creating a great product and happy, healthy, and sustainable company.

Venopi is a team of two (Ivana and Gaurav), and we are not good at showing off and bragging. Two important skills to "wow" investors. So we decided to just do as best as we can with whatever at our disposal, and challenge ourselves to be so good that people will notice us.

The problem with so many venture-capital funded startups is that their investors force them to grow fast in user base without making any money in the first few years, to then sell out to BigCo (e.g. Google, Facebook) for tens of millions or billions of dollars, then write a blog post about their incredible journey, then either shut the site down, or fuck over their users by selling their user data.

We are two lead software engineers and one sales manager. A normal VC funded startup probably has 5 engineers (A good full stack developer is paid $150,000+). Add some marketing and/or sales people and you're close to $1,000,000/y in labor costs.

We are using cloud computing services from DigitalOcean. A dedicated CPU with Memory-Optimized Droplet costs $640/mo up tp $2000/mo (exclusive backup storage and backup server). With backups, this brings us to $15.840/y.

For payment system, we use Mollie and they take percentage of the transactions.

We track our progress and todos using Trello.

Lucky for us, we're nerds so we build most of our system and tools internally so we don't have any other external costs.

We hope that in the future we can have budget for Jira (Issue & Project tracking), Design tools (at this moment, Ivana code and design on the fly), and Customer supports.

Now you understand why Venopi is not free. So if you want Venopi to endure and thrive, please support us by booking through our platform and help us share the words.

Frontend: HTML5, CSS, vanilla JS (some legacy with jQuery), and Vue3.
Backend: Python, Django with MySQL as DB.
Hosting: DigitalOcean
Web3: Solidity, Python, Brownie, JS, Chainlist, Metamask

Venopi is open to do custom partnerships, such as sponsorships and integrations into the site if they match our brand.
Reach us on hello@venopi.com.

Venue owner Pick this if you own a venue, and your service's primary income comes from renting out the space.

Event service Pick this if you offer event services and do not own an event venue—examples: caterers, entertainers, florists, photographers, make-up artists, stage runners, etc.

Suppose customers can only book your catering service and enjoy the meal at your venue. Then you are a venue owner, and you can add your catering service (optional or mandatory) as an extra offer on the pricing menu.

Suppose customers can book your catering service and enjoy the meal at a different venue. Then you can create two listings, one for your venue and the other for your catering service.

Yes, you can.